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ssrc | 1 year ago

Occam looks like a concurrent Pascal, not like a Forth. The transputer had a 3-element hardware stack but it was used more like a cache for the workspace (kind of the memory stack). You can still find around the manual "Transputer Instruction Set - a compiler writer's guide" that explains how you would do that (section 5.3 Expression Evaluation).

Apart from Occam, there where C, C++ and Fortran compilers. Targeting the transputer is not more difficult than any other stack machine (like the JVM, the .Net CLR, CPython or Pascal p-code).

The weird/interesting thing about the transputer is that it is also an operating system: two task queues (high/low priority), preemptive scheduling and communication through channels (that can be one of the 4 serial ports or memory based).

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